According to this article from The Guardian, it would appear to be similar in France.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/14/why-are-brits-s...
I am not exaggerating, there is no register of landlords, there are a lot of bad amateur landlords who bought into cheap "buy to let" mortgages. Agents don't stick up for tenants.
Here in England I have lost deposit money because of blu-tacking a poster to a wall. (That was pre TPS but still).
It is a culture where it is stacked against the renter. You don't feel like it is your home. And in many cases it isn't, the problem isn't just about renting,it is also about house sharing.
Lots of what were two bed houses are now 2 separate 2 bed flats (Convert downstairs room and basement to bedrooms, squeeze in extra kitchenette upstairs). The quality of housing is decreasing to match demand.
And even where that hasn't happened you'll find multi - tenancy is common.
In the most difficult US markets, ownership is a lifeboat on a wild economic sea if you can come up with a downpayment or, even better, can buy outright, as rents tend to grow much more slowly than property taxes. This is doubly true if you own an apartment rather than a house and can just pay a maintenance fee rather than dealing with paying for it yourself.
[1] http://fic.wharton.upenn.edu/fic/papers/03/0301.pdf, Banks' Advantage in Hedging Liquidity Risk: Theory and Evidence from the Commercial Paper Market
Before I wrote this comment I saw that less than a third of families in California can afford to buy a home. Perhaps for an individual family we could make the argument that they are somehow better off not buying, but I'm not sure it's a good thing that very few of them actually could if they wanted to.